Biscuit or cookie?

“England and America are two countries divided by a common language.” So said George Bernard Shaw (allegedly). Much has been written about words that are chiefly used in one country or the other (for example, eggplant in the US and aubergine in the UK), but there are also words that exist in both countries but have different meanings depending on which side of the Atlantic you are on, and it’s very possible to find yourself lost in translation if you don’t know the lingo. For example, if someone in the US were to say they are wearing pants and suspenders to a party, you wouldn’t think anything of it, though you might question your friend’s fashion choices. If you were to make the same declaration in the UK, well, you might question what kind of party you’re going to, and decide to stay in for the night.

Having grown up in the US and the UK, I am acutely aware of how American English and British English are different, and it’s especially interesting when the difference is so subtle. As we’ve recently added snackyto OxfordDictionaries.com, we thought this would be a good opportunity to look at the subtle differences between the biscuit and the cookie.

Let’s start with the biscuit. In the UK, your biscuit might be topped with chocolate or have currants in it. You might dip it in your cup of tea, or have one (or two or maybe three) as a snack after lunch. If you were in the US, however, you might put bacon and eggs on it or smother it in gravy and have it for breakfast. Or you might put a piece of chicken on it and have it for dinner.

Oxforddictionaries.com notes this difference, giving two definitions for the word. But how did these two very different meanings come to be? According to the Oxford English Dictionary(OED), the word biscuit comes originally from the Latin biscotum (panem), which means bread ‘twice baked’, which would explain the hard, crunchy quality of a British biscuit. An American biscuit is more like what the Brits would call a scone (and an American scone is something else entirely), and the pronunciation is another matter entirely. It’s unclear how these two different foods came to have the same word, and we can only speculate about the influence of the French language in the southern United States.

The word cookie opens up a whole other can of worms. In the UK, a cookie is a soft, squishy, moist biscuit (for lack of a better word). British cookies tend to be bigger and more substantial than a British biscuit. In the US, a cookie covers both what the British would call a biscuit and a cookie. The word comes from the Dutch koekje, meaning ‘little cake,’ and could have been popularized in the US due to early Dutch colonization, though we don’t know for sure.

So you’ve got it, right? A British biscuit is an American cookie and an American cookie is a British cookie and an American biscuit is a British scone and an American scone is something else entirely. Simple! Now, what would you like with your tea?

The opinions and other information contained in OxfordWords blog posts and comments do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of Oxford University Press.

Comments

Don’t get your panties – sorry, knickers – in a bunch. “Zucchini” has become an American English term, despite its being on loan from elsewhere. Somebody using the word “chauvinism” ought to know that.

Jeremy Marshall

When I went to the US, I was prepared for “biscuit”, but taken aback by the substance named “gravy” that came with it (a kind of peppered white sauce).

Mark Heil

Now you’re opening a whole new can of worms with gravy. In America gravy can be a thickened “au jus” made primarily from roasted meat drippings or southern “sausage gravy” made by adding cream or milk to the fond left in the pan after cooking breakfast sausage. Additionally, Italian-Americans will often refer to pasta sauce as gravy.

allyson

No transatlantic food debate is complete without a discussion of the definition of “pudding”. In England, pudding seems to be absolutely anything eaten after the main course of a meal. In North America, pudding is pudding.

Adrian Morgan

It’s weird in Australia, where the average person says biscuit but when purchased at a shop it is labelled as a cookie. This has been true since at least the early eighties. I’m not sure how a linguist would account for this, but perhaps with a notion of domestic versus commercial registers.

Gavin Mews

I believe that is in part due to general public lack of knowledge on food origins and Australia admiring the US to a certain extent

Dane Woodward

In my experience a British scone is not soft and fluffy like an American biscuit.

Gavin Mews

I believe you mean American cookie!?

Brenton

Down Under I detest the attempt to market the historic ANZAC Biscuit ,a recipe from decades ago from the Great War as a ANZAC cookie .Go and get stuffed

If that’s the sort of thing that riles you up to detestation, then you’ve had a pretty charmed life.

Aussie

Nothing wrong with what Brenton is saying, we are Australian NOT American, many Aussies are tired of becoming ‘Americanized’

Just like it is tomato sauce NOT ketchup.

Gavin Mews

Just my experience was thing such as chocolate chip came under cookie as a child being told it was american invention making it a cookie

In what it was to represent or named after such as museli being biscuits if invented under the British commonwealth.

Please correct me if wrong

Neo Salivahana

In India: Medium sized moist biscuits with chocolate chips sold at franchised stores like “Subway” = Cookies, the rest are biscuits.

Zeon

Medium sized moist cookie with chocolate chips* AMERICA! ALL OTHER FORMS OF ENGLISH ARE WRONG. I will continue to say this and edit any article I can find that I can also edit to use the correct American English terms and spellings.